Last week I had the exact same conversation four times. With four different WordPress developers. All women.

The topic: I want to publish code, discuss issues that matter, ask questions to core developers, blog, make some noise, contribute, but I’m to afraid to do that. It reminded me of myself.

What is the matter with us women? Why the self inflicted self pity and lack of confidence?

“I am not good enough, I don’t know enough, what if they think I’m stupid, my English really sucks.”

Do only female WordPress programmers think that way? Or are women and men with talent and knowledge all over the world hiding themselves, because they think they aren’t good enough? Sobbing under their desks, anxiously staring at the world, hiding from critisim and ridicule. What a waste of talent and possibilities!

So what are we afraid of, why sell we ourselves short?

Every contribution, blog post, piece of code you publish is valuable. Criticism is part of the job, learn from it, don’t hide, embrace it, it helps you getting better! Nobody makes fun of you when you want to contribute and do you best. You are most welcome!

Do you really think all the guys, that make so much noise, always write perfect code and never make mistakes? Hell no, just like you they work and learn, make mistakes, write bugs and try to improve themselves.

Exactly the same as you…

So girl: pull yourself together, put your teeth into it, jump in at the deep end. Study hard and publish what you found useful. Respect is not earned by sitting silently in a corner.

Show what you can do and be proud of yourself, and don’t be afraid to make a mistake. We are all human, boys and girls alike.

The Genesis Framework is my favorite tool to build a WordPress website. And with the next update (version 2.2) a lot of accessibility features and fixes will be added. But a framework is no child theme.
The HTML5 themes you can purchase with StudioPress have a beautiful responsive menu for the primary navigation. And that menu is completely inaccessible for keyboard and screen reader users.

What’s wrong?

The HTML code to show the responsive menu is:

<div class="responsive-menu-icon"></div>

A div is not focusable, if you tab though a page the menu is skipped and you have no way to open it, only by using a mouse. And also the div is an empty container, with no content.

What needs to be changed?

Change the <div> to a <button>, a button is focusable and clickable

Add some text inside the <button></button> to tell a screen reader user what the button is about. You can make this visibly hidden by using the screen-reader-text class

Tell a screen reader user if the menu is open or closed by adding dynamically aria-expanded=”false” or aria-expanded=”true”

You have to add the screen-reader-text class and maybe change the CSS .responsive-menu-icon to style the button so it fits your theme.

So: by changing a few lines of JavaScript and adding a few lines of CSS you turn your responsive menu into a perfectly accessible awesome responsive menu.

Discussion

Yes, this is a quick and dirty fix. There’s now untranslatable hardcoded text in the JavaScript, this could be done way better and cleaner. But you’ve got the picture of what needs to be changed. If you are a JavaScript pro: all help is welcome 🙂